How the Fleet Foxes Frontman Got Out to Get Back In

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Fleet Foxes, from left: Christian Wargo, Morgan Henderson, Casey Wescott, Skyler Skjelset and Robin Pecknold.CreditCreditKyle Johnson for The New York Times

By David Peisner

May 31, 2017

SEATTLE — Between January and March of 2013, the Fleet Foxes frontman, Robin Pecknold, lived alone in a small house in Port Townsend, Wash., a wind-swept town on the northeast tip of the Olympic Peninsula — a two-hour ride from Seattle by car and ferry — that empties during the dark, chilly winters. He spent his days taking a 12-week woodworking course that emphasized labor-intensive traditional craftsmanship using hand tools. Most nights, he went for long runs through the town’s hills, streets and marinas.

It was a curious place to find the lead singer and sole songwriter of one of the most successful indie-rock bands of the past decade. Fleet Foxes’ first two albums of meticulous, expansive folk-rock have sold more than two million copies worldwide. But Mr. Pecknold’s life ran aground during the making of the Grammy-nominated 2011 album “Helplessness Blues.” His single-minded focus on the project and his constant interrogation of his own motivations and self-worth made for compelling music but toxic living.

On the album’s epic, introspective title track, he sings that he would “rather be a functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me” and admits, “I don’t know what that will be/I’ll get back to you someday soon,” with an answer.

“Soon,” it turned out, was relative. When Fleet Foxes’ new album, “Crack-Up,” is released on Friday, June 16, it will be more than six years since “Helplessness Blues.” But the band is returning with a weighty, ambitious album of shape-shifting songs that builds on the exacting finger-plucked guitar melodies and cooing multipart harmonies central to its earlier music. At a time when indie-rock seems be growing more culturally marginal by the day, “Crack-Up” is a defiant artistic statement, an album that dares to feel important. It leaked more than a month before its scheduled release date, a frustrating turn of events but one the band ultimately found encouraging.

“It leaked because people want it,” Skye Skjelset, the band’s guitarist, said during an interview alongside Mr. Pecknold in a 113-year-old Japanese restaurant here on the day of the leak. The two friends had started Fleet Foxes together as teenagers. Today, Mr. Skjelset, 31, rail-thin with an angular face and shoulder-length brown hair, was dressed head to toe in black; Mr. Pecknold, also 31, tall and lean, with sleepy eyes, wore a tattered green Army jacket, dark pants and a knit cap. Mr. Pecknold admitted he spent part of the day reading internet comments about the new album. “Most of them were positive. Then there was one that just said, ‘Boring,’” he said with a short laugh.

For a time, it wasn’t clear there would even be an album to leak. Songwriting sessions in 2013 quickly petered out. “It felt O.K. to not have to think about doing it for a long time,” Mr. Skjelset said. “I didn’t know it was going to be as long as it was. I definitely came to terms with the fact that this band was never happening again.”

“You did?” Mr. Pecknold said, turning to his friend, surprised.

“For sure,” Mr. Skjelset answered.

The seeds of the long hiatus were planted during the tortured process of making “Helplessness Blues.” As Mr. Pecknold grew increasingly obsessed with realizing his vision, his band mates often became little more than sidemen. The rest of his life crumbled. He split with his longtime girlfriend and was experiencing what he called “an early-onset identity crisis.” As touring began, relationships within the band frayed. Mr. Pecknold was also in physical pain, having delayed surgery for an ailment he prefers to keep private.

After the tour, the drummer Josh Tillman quit. He later began releasing sardonic solo albums under the moniker Father John Misty and told The Guardian of his waning days with Fleet Foxes: “We all started hating each other. There were a lot of tears.”

In the fall of 2012, Mr. Pecknold left Portland, Ore., where he’d only recently moved: “I got rid of all my stuff and was just floating around for six months.” He cut his hair short and shaved his beard, then backpacked alone in Hawaii and Nepal and attended the woodworking school. For about eight months, he rarely touched a guitar. “I didn’t know what to do,” he said. “I thought it would be cool to be unmoored for a little while.”

In 2013, he enrolled in an undergraduate program at Columbia designed for older students and moved to New York. His routines became almost monastic. “I was studying constantly, and when I wasn’t, I was exercising,” he recalled. “I went down this weird, masochistic path. I never again in my life want to have an experience that isolating.”

At Columbia, he wasn’t often recognized — the haircut and shave helped — and found it simultaneously liberating and dispiriting to be an anonymous college freshman. “It was weird to be like: ‘I have zero out of 126 credits. I have nothing to give to anyone, because my past is erased and I’m now in this class.’”

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Fleet Foxes at the Bowery Ballroom in 2008, with Mr. Pecknold seated.CreditRahav Segev for The New York Times

Daniel Rossen, a vocalist and songwriter for the band Grizzly Bear, has known Mr. Pecknold since before Fleet Foxes’ 2008 self-titled debut album, and related to his struggles. “He wants to challenge himself,” he said. “I’ve definitely gone through that, where you lose sight of the value of what you’re doing, and it’s easy to see much more valuable ways to spend your life.”

Eventually, Mr. Pecknold emerged from his cocoon. He performed Pearl Jam’s “Corduroy” on “The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon” with Mr. Rossen and went on a short tribute tour playing the 1974 album “No Other,” by one of the original Byrds, Gene Clark, alongside members of other indie rock bands. The loose vibe helped answer some questions for Mr. Pecknold. “I was just like, it’s worth doing if it moves you or you feel you’re pointed in the right direction while you’re working on it,” Mr. Pecknold said. “There doesn’t need to be a why.”

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Mr. Pecknold performing at the 9:30 Club in Washington in 2014 with members of Beach House, the Walkmen, Wye Oak, Grizzly Bear and other bands for a tribute to the Gene Clark album “No Other.”CreditKyle Gustafson for The Washington Post/Getty Images

That focus on enjoying the present made the “Crack-Up” sessions a refreshing change from the grind that birthed “Helplessness Blues.” Mr. Skjelset said that when Mr. Pecknold texted him about reassembling Fleet Foxes — which also includes the guitarist-bassist Christian Wargo, the keyboardist Casey Wescott and the multi-instrumentalist Morgan Henderson — Mr. Skjelset made it clear the band’s working dynamics needed to change: “If we’re going to do this, it has to be something that’s not going to make us want to kill ourselves.”

In practical terms, that meant making “Crack-Up” more of a team effort. In the early stages, Mr. Pecknold sent out Google Docs with thoughts about the album and the things that were influencing him, then encouraged his band mates to add their own ideas. “I wanted to leave room in all the songs for people to make their mark in a way I wasn’t comfortable letting them do on the last one,” he said. As the recording commenced, stress levels remained refreshingly low. “It was just fun,” Mr. Wargo said. “Everybody’s head was very clear, and it was drama-free.”

The resulting album, produced by Mr. Pecknold and Mr. Skjelset, is breathtaking in its scope. The opening track, “I Am All That I Need/Arroyo Seco/Thumbprint Scar,” careens from dreary, self-doubting dirge to bright, breathless acoustic rocker and back multiple times before strings sweep in like a soothing balm. Many songs undergo similar shifts. The album’s centerpiece, the nearly nine-minute “Third of May/Odaigahara,” begins as a vibrant, soaring celebration but falls periodically into quiet, contemplative passages as Mr. Pecknold wraps his supple voice around phrases that reflect, albeit obliquely, the journey he’s been on the past six years: “Can I be light and free?”; “To be held within oneself is deathlike”; “I was a fool.”

“The way the songs move between sections is almost like moving between emotional states,” Mr. Rossen said. “It’s very cinematic. There’s a lot of disappointment and loss, but it’s like a triumph. Robin made it through to the other side in a way that doesn’t feel cynical.”

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Robin PecknoldCreditKyle Johnson for The New York Times

The title nods to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1936 essay “The Crack-Up,” which chronicled the author’s own existential crisis. Fitzgerald writes, “I began to realize that for two years my life had been drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually.” Mr. Pecknold glimpsed the shadow of his own “crack-up” in Fitzgerald’s.

“I was trying to find new things to care about,” he said. Fitzgerald’s essay was “exactly about that — needing to build your own reasons for living.”

On a rainy evening in May, the band gathered in a cramped rehearsal space in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood to run through the set for a tour beginning two days later. Mr. Pecknold, standing near a rack of guitars amid crumpled-up pieces of paper, boxes of Vicks VapoPads and vitamin C supplements, was clearly in charge, but also at ease. As he put it later, “I wasn’t always secure enough as an individual to be in a room like that and not feel exhausted.”

After working through other songs from their three albums, they finished with a rejiggered “Helplessness Blues,” the song that in some ways started Mr. Pecknold on the road to where he and the band find themselves now. Gone were the ecstatic acoustic guitars and the sense of revelation embedded in the original song. This new version felt more considered. A lyric was altered, too, from “If I had an orchard, I’d work till I’m sore” to “No time for an orchard with all that’s in store.”

“That song got a little misinterpreted, that line in particular,” Mr. Pecknold said after rehearsal. Fans often took it literally to mean Mr. Pecknold wanted to chuck it all and go raise fruit trees. “To me, the line was more, ‘I just want something to do.’” The lyric is more optimistic now, less yearning, a reflection of a songwriter and a band that’s more comfortable with who they are and where they’re headed.

“Making this album, I was like: I get to do this? This is what I wake up and do? This seems like a dream,” he said. “Now I feel lucky.”